Vanessa Bee - 3-Minute Horsemanship. 60 Amazingly Achievable Lessons to Improve Your Horse When Time Is Short

This book has been especially written for you, the time-starved, twenty-first-century horse owner. Day after day you make a promise to train yourself and your horse to be better at something, but when you get to the barn there just doesnt seem to be enough time.

Well, all this is about to change. Whether you are an accomplished horseman or a complete beginner, you will find that 3-Minute Horsemanship is ideal when time is short.

Dont worry. Im not going to tell you to read the book all the way through because I know you havent got time! As you look through these pages you will see that there are three distinct Sections:

• Part One: Ground Exercises. The first is devoted to demonstrating 35 3-Minute Exercises-all in hand to develop various skills.
• Part Two: Ridden Exercises. The next 25 exercises are all performed on the horses back.

Both Parts One and Two contain short, achievable tasks that can be built upcombined with othersto draw on when you are faced with a real-life more complicated challenge.

• Part Three: Real Life Scenarios. Here are 20 commonly experienced challenges, which you can solve by using a combination of the exercises learned in Parts One and Two.

We often look at the big task and just give up because it seems too much to fit into our busy lives. In Part Three, I show you how to break any challenge down into small manageable exerciseswithout stress for you or your horse.

This is not a program; you are not ticking boxes before moving on.

Instead, you can dip into any one of the 3-Minute Exercises and work on it that day because thats what you feel like doing. A few exercises need previous ones to help them get started, but mostly they work successfully when done on their own.

What really matters is the quality of the training and how you finish the session. Many of us give up because something isnt working. What message does that send to the horse? Not a good one, obviously. On the other hand, when we stop because an exercise is working, we feel good, the horse feels good, and there is another building block to success. It really is possible to carry out good-quality progressive training with your horse in only three minutes a day when you work in this way.

So when you have a specific training problem to solve, start by looking in Part Three at the Real Life Scenarios. But, if you just want to improve your horsemanship in a general way, you can dabble away to your hearts content in the Parts One and Two, and watch you and your horse really improve in just three minutes a day.

As you develop your ground work and riding techniques these movements will become more subtle until, to the onlooker, there seems to be no physical movement as you communicate with your horse. This book is not about classical equitation; its a book about working with your horse in such a way that you both learn to work together quietly and harmoniously. Once this has been achieved you can start to work on the finer points of your horsemanship.

It was while I was training my horses and ponies for Horse Agility that I began to notice that when the teaching session was short, ending on a positive note, the animals appeared to learn more quickly.

Due to my other work commitments, my daily training time was limited, so I would set small, achievable tasks for each horse to be sure that we could reach a positive conclusion in the time I had available. Because the question I asked of the horse was so simple, as soon as he had either completed the task, or made some headway toward achieving it, I would stop and reward him. I was amazed at how quickly the horses learned a new skill even though the sessions were so short. However, I became even more interested when I realized that when I set up a session with a realistic goal,